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Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications

Product ID: Articles
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Undergraduate
High School

Minimodule: A Suspended Camera Control System

Author: Brian Pasko


Introduction

We design a system for a suspended mobile camera to be used in sports stadiums. Our system consists of a camera attached to four winches situated at the four cardinal ends of the stadium. An operator need only specify the desired position of the camera in the stadium, and our system automatically delivers the camera there. The reader should be familiar with parametric equations-constructing them and differentiating them, in both two and three dimensions. An interest in sports and/or filming may help provide motivation, and an interest in mathematics is a necessity!

Background

Suspended mobile camera systems are ubiquitous in modern stadiums. They are used at most major sporting events, large music events, and other large social events, including the U.S. (Tennis) Open, the filming of the Spiderman movies, and even college football games (see Figure 1). One such camera system is Skycamr; others are Cablecamr (also made by Skycam, Inc. of Oklahoma). Spidercamr (manufactured by spidercam GmbH of Austria), and ZipCamr (made by ZipCam Systems). We focus on the use in sports stadiums. The design allows the camera to reach any point in the stadium, as well as to track objects via physical motion of the camera and the tilt/pan capabilities of the lens. What follows are details of an automated control system that allows the operator simply to specify the desired location of the camera.

©2012 by COMAP, Inc.
The UMAP Journal 33.4
12 pages

Mathematics Topics:

Application Areas:

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